folioidut

Folioidut is a coined term in digital humanities describing a granular data unit that represents a single page or leaf in a digitized document, together with its navigational and interpretive metadata. It aims to support precise citation, edition work, and multi-layer annotation across manuscript corpora.

Origins and scope: Folioidut emerged in the 2020s as libraries and researchers sought a uniform way to link page images, transcriptions, and annotations. It is not an official standard but a design pattern compatible with existing library ecosystems. The name fuses folio (the leaf unit) with a data-oriented suffix denoting a discrete unit.

Structure: A folioidut includes a unique identifier, a label (for example, folio 12 verso), a sequence number, a link to the image resource, a transcription layer, and an annotation layer. Optional fields cover attribution, provenance, and digitization quality. It may encode anchoring information such as region coordinates on the page.

Serialization and interoperability: Folioiduts can be serialized as JSON-LD or XML and are designed to be compatible with frameworks such as IIIF manifests and TEI corpora, enabling cross-document navigation and search. They support renderings in image-first, OCR-first, or scholarly edition views.

Applications and workflow: In digitization projects, folioiduts enable page-level citation, edition comparison, and transcription alignment. In research, they support reproducible edition work and facet-based search across page-level metadata.

Status and reception: Critics warn of fragmentation if implementations diverge, while proponents cite clarity and precision. Folioidut remains a conceptual pattern discussed in theory rather than a universal standard.

Related concepts include IIIF, TEI, OCR, digitization, and manuscript studies.